Tag: ebBIM

Yesterday (6/19/2012), the National Academies Federal Facility Council hosted a timely, and potentially watermark event “Predicting Outcomes of Investments in Maintenance and Repair of Federal Facilities“.

It is my hope that this event and those similar to it be expanded as much as possible to assist all real property owners, architects, contractors, subcontractors, building product manufactures, oversight groups, and the community truly practice facility life-cycle management, referred to more recently as BIM (building information modeling / management).

Key Topics / Take Aways:

Identify and advance technologies, processes, and management practices that improve the performance of federal facilities over their entire life-cycle, from planning to disposal.

Strategic approaches for investing in facilities maintenance and repair to achieve beneficial outcomes and to mitigate risks. Such approaches should do the following:

• Identify and prioritize the outcomes to be achieved through maintenance and repair investments and link those outcomes to achievement of agencies’ missions and other public policy objectives.
• Provide a systematic approach to performance measurement, analysis, and feedback.
• Provide for greater transparency and credibility in budget development, decision making, and budget execution.

• Identify and prioritize the beneficial outcomes that are to be achieved through maintenance and repair investments, preferably in the form of a 5- to 10-year plan agreed on by all levels of the organization.
• Establish a risk-based process for prioritizing annual maintenance and repair activities in the field and at the headquarters level.
• Establish standard methods for gathering and updating data to provide credible, empirical information for decision support, to measure outcomes from investments in maintenance and repair, and to track and improve the results.

Condition Survey Inspection Types
Deficiency: The “traditional” inspection discussed previously.
Distress Survey: The identification of distress types (i.e. crack, damage, etc.), severity (low, medium, high) and density (percentage) present. Data directly used in the calculation of the CSCI. No estimate of cost or priority.
Distress Survey with Quantities: Same as distress survey except that distress quantities are measured or counted. The resulting density is more accurate than a distress survey, thus the CSCI is more precise.
Direct Rating: A one-step process that combines inspection and condition assessment. An alphanumeric rating (three categories, three subcategories each) is assigned to the component-section by the inspector. Rating is directly correlated to a CSCI value, but is less accurate than a CSCI derived from a distress survey. Quick, but no record of what’s wrong.

About The Federal Facilities Council

The Federal Facilities Council (FFC) was established at the National Academies in 1953 as the Federal Construction Council. The mission of the FFC is to identify and advance technologies, processes, and management practices that improve the performance of federal facilities over their life-cycles, from programming to disposal. The FFC is sponsored and funded by more than 20 federal agencies with responsibilities for and mutual issues related to all aspects of facilities design, construction, operations, renewal, and management.

The FFC fulfills its mission by networking and by sharing information among its sponsoring federal agencies and by leveraging its resources to conduct policy and technical studies, conferences, forums, and workshops on topics of mutual interest. The activities to be undertaken in any given calendar year are approved by a committee composed of senior representatives from each of the sponsor agencies.

Much of the work of the FFC is carried out by its 5 standing committees, each of which meets quarterly. The majority of meetings include presentations by guest speakers from the federal community, academia, and the private sector and these presentations are open to the public. The presentation slides are posted on the Events page of this website. If you would like to automatically receive notices of new reports or upcoming events, please subscribe to the FFC listserv.
Within the National Academies, the FFC operates under the auspices of the Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment (BICE) of the National Research Council. The BICE provides oversight and guidance for FFC activities and serves as a link between the sponsoring federal agencies and other elements of the building community, both national and international.